Religion and the Regulation of the Subject

I understand religion herein, not as a code word for Christianity, nor as a category that effectively or exhaustively unites all religious traditions under its banner,^{Footnote 12} homogenizing the many spiritual and transcendental discourses of the world under the guise of unity, or bringing together East and West or Abrahamic and otherwise.^{Footnote 13} Instead, I find it instructive to examine how the contemporary idea of religion can be untranslated in such a way that considers the origins of the Latin religio and the Greek thrēskeia, following the pioneering work of Daniel Boyarin and Carlin Barton in their recent book Imagine No Religion: How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities.

Given the anachronism of translating the terms ‘religio’ and ‘thrēskeia’ as ‘religion’ when they are encountered in ancient texts, Boyarin and Barton resist the sacralization of abstraction and the reification of technical terms by examining particular uses of each term in the context of Ancient Rome.^{Footnote 14} Focusing on Tertullian and Josephus, Boyarin and Barton value specificity over generality in a way that resists easy summary but does not necessarily prohibit it. In general, Boyarin and Barton claim that the Ancient Romans had no religion, at least not in the sense in which we think of it today. Ancient societies did not stratify their experience by dividing religion from private life or labour. The terms ‘religio’ and ‘thrēskeia’ do not refer to concepts that can be abstracted or separated from the lived experience of “eating, sleeping, defecating, having sexual intercourse, making revolts and wars, cursing, blessing, exalting, degrading, judging, punishing, buying, selling, raiding, revolting, building bridges, collecting rents and taxes.”^{Footnote 15} Boyarin and Barton discover in the Latin ‘religio’ a philological treasure trove of meaning hitherto concealed by its simplistic translation as ‘religion’ by modern scholars. Ancient Roman citizens were motivated by a sense of religio that focused their attention and consisted in part of “a homeostatic system of reciprocities moving back and forth across a boundary or bond—an emotional economy closely related to and reflecting the self-regulating ‘government of shame’ of cultures without powerful centralized institutions and means to enforce their claims to authority and legitimacy.”^{Footnote 16} Religio is a kind of bond or being-bound, a sense of “doubt, hesitation, constraint, scrupulousness, carefulness, anxiety, awe, fear, and dread” that makes one pause or decide on a different course of action.^{Footnote 17} Both positive and negative, and inhering in people, cities, gods, and holy places, religio in Ancient Rome was not imposed hierarchically or even necessarily chosen out of freedom. Instead, “religio, like an unpaid debt, hung over one like a curse, binding one and causing one anxiety.”^{Footnote 18}

And so we can ask—while not expecting this etymological exploration to bear the weight of this inquiry, but instead expecting that Boyarin and Barton’s exploration can evoke a fresh thought—what of the contemporary anxiety that hangs over us like a cloud here in late modern capitalist society, consisting of precarities that are at once existential, financial, and political? For example, in her book State of Insecurity Isabell Lorey furthers the Foucauldian notion of ‘governmentality,’ a term that names the ways in which modern individuals are governed on the level of selfhood, by state or cultural power in both repressive ways and through certain emancipatory modes of self-governance (she describes an “ambivalence between subjugation and self-empowerment”).^{Footnote 19} Although Lorey is concerned with labour and the financial precarity engendered by present modes of capitalist production, she also identifies that the precariousness of the modern subject on the social level also has an existential aspect. Later in her book she writes,

Not entirely unlike the overhanging anxiety that motivated the Ancient Roman religio, today we experience our own sense of anxiety that motivates our restraint and causes our constant self-regulation and self-checking. We might ask: what are the contemporary sensibilities that bind us back, or give us pause, encouraging our self-regulation and self-governance, and governing our self-understanding? While not attempting a return to some pristine origin of religious spirit in the Ancient Roman religio, and not attempting to draw too strong a parallel over the historical divide between the ancient world and the present, it is refreshing to encounter the strangeness of the Ancient Roman religio as an entryway into contemporary reflection on the meaning of religion and the secular, for in some ways it does not truly seem so strange. We do indeed have our own distinct type of religio, a sense in which we must construct and regulate and project a modern self between the religious and secular influences of our world.

From Boyarin and Barton to Lorey, the idea of a religio as that which binds and restrains the self plainly shows us the historicity of our concepts and the debt we incur in our use of them, particularly the present use of the term ‘religion.’ If we truly live in a secular society emancipated from the supposedly hierarchical and institutional control of religion, then by what principles do we restrain ourselves and form our ethics? Instead of the secular dream of value-neutrality and the fading of religious illusion, it seems that in some way it is impossible to separate religion and secularity, for secularization runs in both directions between religion and secularity. On one hand, religious concepts become ‘evacuated’ into secular shells (religion-becoming-secular); but, on the other hand, secular concepts take on an almost ‘religious’ meaning in the way that they are adhered to and ritually observed (secular-becoming-religious).^{Footnote 21} This chiasm is difficult to tease apart, for it shows that the secular and the religious are intertwined and indebted to each other, and it is the contention of this essay that the debt must be mutually paid, and not just through recognition from afar, but rather by sustained translation work that mobilizes both secular-philosophical and theological or religious self-understanding to work toward a world with less suffering and violence. In order to move toward a postsecular critique of violence, we must first understand this relationship of conceptual indebtedness between religion and secularity.

Political Theology

The discourse called ‘political theology’ has sought to address this problematic debt.^{Footnote 22} Symptomatic of the regulatory norms of the discourse, I now mention that Carl Schmitt, the Nazi philosopher of jurisprudence, is a founding voice in political theology, for it was he who wrote that “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development … but also because of their systematic structure.”^{Footnote 23} For Schmitt, the sovereign leader is the one who decides on the state of exception, and “[t]he exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology”—not only analogous but secularized.^{Footnote 24} That the miracle is secularized into the exception is one thing, but that God (the giver of miracles in exception to nature) is secularized into the sovereign leader (the decider on exceptions to state law) is quite another. With this discursive beginning signalled, I will leave the evaluation of Schmitt to others while noting that the discourse on the secularization of concepts often marks his work as a beginning point.^{Footnote 25}

In his book, The Kingdom and the Glory, Giorgio Agamben traces the theological lineage of oikonomia back to the Trinity and the location of political power in glory.^{Footnote 26} Radicalizing Schmitt’s thesis, Agamben argues that Schmitt’s statement quoted above “should be supplemented in a way that would extend its validity well beyond the boundaries of public law, extending up to the fundamental concepts of the economy and the very idea of the reproductive life of human societies.”^{Footnote 27} Surveying the works of Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, and the ‘signatures’ of Paracelsus and Boehme, Agamben suggests that “secularization operates in the conceptual system of modernity as a signature that refers it back to theology.”^{Footnote 28} This signature of secularization serves to remind us that theological concepts often underpin what we think are secular ways of thinking and knowing. One significant thinker who addresses this debt in a way that is both (and neither) secular and religious is the German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. According to Michael Löwy, Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History” (unpublished in his lifetime) “constitutes one of the most important philosophical and political texts of the twentieth century.”^{Footnote 29} Like Bloch, Benjamin’s critique of progress rests on his understanding of messianism, which he sees as a core concept of the philosophy of history and (like Jacob Taubes) an alarming call for a more emancipatory concept of history.^{Footnote 30}

Even a brief look at Benjamin’s text yields insights that complement the above critiques of the secular in Schmitt and Agamben.^{Footnote 31} For Benjamin, “The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption” and this redemptive aspect of the past becomes a part of our present as we are “endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.”^{Footnote 32} For Benjamin, the historical materialist must recognize that the claim that the past has on the present “cannot be settled cheaply.”^{Footnote 33} In the search to settle that debt (which I suggest is partly the debt of the secular to the religious), Benjamin emphasizes that the recognition of the past does not come to us with certainty, nor all at once. Instead of conditioning our vision of the past with a kind of realism that desires to ascertain ‘what actually happened,’ Benjamin says that we must begin by “appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.”^{Footnote 34} Dangerous memory is something that names the risk that the historical materialist takes when remembering and inheriting a tradition, specifically the risk that our image of the past will serve the dominant ruling class.^{Footnote 35} The messianic coming of history is not just redemptive for Benjamin, but emancipatory. He writes that “[t]he subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself” and that history is not made up of “empty time, but time filled with now-time [Jetztzeit].”^{Footnote 36} Instead of “homogenous empty time” Benjamin seeks a universal history that shocks and crystallizes in the “messianic arrest of happening” or “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”^{Footnote 37}

And so the critique of the secular suggested by Schmitt and Agamben above accords with Benjamin on this point, and is deepened by his language of debt and emancipation. Our reading of history is not neutral, and our reading of history is not enacted except in moments that are punctuating interruptions in the rolling hills of what Benjamin calls “homogenous empty time.” Instead of understanding our historical reflection as a mere exercise in rear-faced empirical vision, Benjamin enjoins us to cultivate an historical consciousness that moves beyond descriptive observation and spectatorship to the active and prescriptive search for the forgotten or erased aspects of history in need of remembering, and the ways in which these hidden histories can serve to emancipate the oppressed today. One way in which to proceed along the lines of this emancipatory history is to recognize, with Benjamin, that the debt we owe to the past requires both the critique of the secular and the admission of religious influence, and the reverse payment in which religions face their complex complicity in the violences an oppressions of the world.

The Critique of the Secular

Understanding that, for better and for worse, the contemporary secular position works unsuccessfully to conceal its historical debt to Christianity, and understanding that many (but not all!) political and social concepts are secularized Christian theological concepts, we are then witness to varying responses. One major response to this critique of the secular reasserts Christian superiority following the recognition of the secular debt to Christianity, and another effaces Christianity altogether by using that same inheritance to blame Christianity for the violence of the world.^{Footnote 38} Neither of these two (albeit simplified and caricatured) options will do, for neither the assertion of Christian superiority nor the scapegoating of Christianity have sufficiently accounted for the complex relationship between religion and violence.

On one hand, schools of thought that respond to the secular debt to Christianity by triumphantly asserting Christianity as the true bearer of history and truth forget the complicity and culpability of Christianity with the violence of the world. On the other hand, schools of thought that respond to the secular inheritance of Christian concepts by rejecting Christianity outright or putting Christianity on trial for all violence forget that violence cannot solely be blamed on Christianity, or religion for that matter, for that would require an impossibly clean distinction between religion, culture, and politics, each of which contribute to the propagation of violence in an inextricable interrelation.

In his book, Theopolitical Imagination, William Cavanaugh argues that the secular political imagination “is really theology in disguise,” and provocatively suggests that “the modern state is built upon a soteriology of rescue from violence.”^{Footnote 39} Cavanaugh argues that, while the modern secular state presents a vision of salvation from religious violence, it fails to truly save anyone from violence and instead allows the state to justify its own ‘secular’ violence.^{Footnote 40} This claim sets the stage for Cavanaugh’s larger study The Myth of Religious Violence in which he sets out to systematically disprove the idea that religion necessarily entails violence, albeit in a nuanced and easily misunderstood way. Cavanaugh understands the myth of religious violence to be the “idea that religion is a transhistorical and transcultural feature of human life, essentially distinct from ‘secular’ features such as politics and economics, which has a peculiarly dangerous inclination to promote violence.”^{Footnote 41} Just as Boyarin and Barton show that the Ancient Roman religio admits no distinction between religion and social life, we can ask whether this indistinction also applies to modern life. Doubtless for different reasons, but in a similar spirit of critique, Cavanaugh argues that religion is not something separable from the culture in which it is found, or the political systems that both oppose and propagate its structures, or the economic systems that intertwine with it (for example, the kinship relationship between Christianity and capitalism). Because it is impossible to extricate religion from its embeddedness in social and political life, it is therefore impossible to blame religion solely for the violences of the world by pointing to a religious group that acts violently and stating with certainty that it is religion that is the cause of its violence and not other economic, cultural, or social factors. This is not to say that religions are absolved of their complicity with violence, nor is it the reassertion of the Christian master narrative, but rather it is simply to say (with Cavanaugh) that religion is not the decisive factor in what makes some individual, institution, state, or group violent.^{Footnote 42}

The Critique of Violence as a Postsecular Opportunity

If both ‘religion’ and the ‘secular’ are terms that attempt to unify what cannot be unified—for they both name interiorly diverse groups, some of whom act violently and some of whom do not—then it stands to reason that this ambiguity in the representational relationship between the One (the name) and the Many (what is named) not only entails the negative thesis that religion and violence cannot be straightforwardly identified with each other, but could also entail the positive thesis that the critique of violence evades simple associations either with religion or the secular. While Cavanaugh argues that religion cannot bear the sole blame for the violence of the world, in reverse form, I argue that the critique of violence cannot be restricted either to the ‘reasonable’ secular person who resists fanaticism and extremism, nor the ‘faithful’ Christian person who resists violent secular power. This naturalized division is artificial and does not serve the interests of the critique of violence. Like the violences of war and terrorism, the critique of violence also knows no bounds, cutting across religion, secularity, culture, and politics, being motivated by both piety and greed, devotion and the desire for power, faithfulness and the fear of difference (none of which can be purely separated from the other in practice).

And so, perhaps the critique of violence is a postsecular opportunity relevant in a transdisciplinary way to philosophers, Christian theologians, and scholars of religion. Such is the wager of this study. That said, there are surely exceptions to this nonviolent possibility present in the work of postsecular thinkers. The French philosopher Georges Bataille, for example, evades categorization as a religious or secular thinker, but bases much of this evasion on a distinction between human and animal that is in no way opposed to violence. Instead, it is the limit-experiences of suffering and sexual violence upon which much of his transgressive work hinges. In his Theory of Religion, Bataille describes the difference between humanity and animality by ascribing transcendence to the former and radical immanence to the latter.^{Footnote 43} The abstract human can adjudicate based on overdetermining laws and norms, but the animal knows no violence because it has no standard by which to judge what is violated. Through the mediations of tool-use and the distinction between sacred and profane, humanity can identify and police violence and profanation. But, without these abstracting and transcending structures and boundary discourses, there is no violence to speak of—only the plane of immanence in which one animal simply eats another.^{Footnote 44} In Bataille we see that not all thinkers who defy the boundary between religion and secularity bring with them a critique of violence, but this does not foreclose the potential of a postsecular critique of metaphysical violence, but rather may even deepens it in ways that will soon become apparent.

Theory and Practice

With the postsecular context established, I now move to the critique of violence. The critique of violence with which I am concerned in this essay proceeds from a particular vision of the relationship between theory and practice, or thought and action—a vision that sees attitudes and ways of knowing (epistemologies) as complex precursors to actions that themselves undergird habits and practices from the individual level to the political and social level. However, the relationship between violent ways of knowing and arranging the abstract objects of that knowledge in metaphysical terms, and the actions of human beings is not one of simply continuity, nor one of discontinuity. Instead of expecting that violent ways of thinking reliably result in violent acts, it is better to proceed to the negative thesis that the critique of violent epistemologies and the metaphysical perspectives they underpin is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the reduction of social violences.

Some thinkers negotiate the relationship between theory and practice by pursuing a theoretical orientation that acknowledges the historical determination of practices. For example, in the introduction to his Theory and Practice, Jürgen Habermas suggests a way of theorizing that encompasses theory and practice under the auspices of praxis. In this ideal scenario, theory is oriented toward action and becomes self-critique by reflecting on its own origins and history.^{Footnote 45} Here Habermas inherits the distinction between traditional and critical theory made by Max Horkheimer,^{Footnote 46} and relies upon the critique of abstraction as that which sacrifices particularity for universality. In this way, the discourse of critical theory during and after the time of the Frankfurt School attempts to keep theory sufficiently close to practice so that the abstraction of theory does not prevent it from assisting in the practical emancipation of the oppressed, but instead works toward it.

The present study seeks a similar ideal, aiming to provide a theoretical and abstract backing force for contemporary political and social struggles against material violences. Because violent epistemologies underpin violent actions—for we would not have the social violences of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. without (often implicit) epistemologies and ontologies of personhood, discourse, and sociality that permit and encourage dehumanization and prejudice—the critique of violence must therefore attend to the issue of epistemological violence, lest it bypass theory in the name of practice and attack a symptom and not its potential causes. Another thinker (already mentioned) who embodies the postsecular spirit that the present study seeks to name is Sölle, who quotes Lenin’s statement “there is no such thing as abstract truth; truth is always concrete” as a support to her simultaneously Christian and Marxist goals of emancipation.^{Footnote 47} In light of this concreteness, which is similar in its goals to Habermas’ praxis, Sölle argues from her Christian position that “Christianity sees the truth as concrete, historical and partisan” both changing with the situation at hand (contextual) and changing the situation at hand (revolutionary).^{Footnote 48} Not asserting the truth of Christianity in a way that seeks to lord it over others in power, but instead asserting that the truth of Christianity is a kind of love that rejects the abuse of power, Sölle resists the abstract resignation of Pilate’s question to Jesus, “What is truth?”^{Footnote 49}

René Girard and Walter Wink

Rather than swear off the positive resourcing of Christian thinkers like Sölle for fear that secular sensibilities will be offended—while conscious of the often honourable motivations of those sensibilities—I now turn to the works of René Girard and Walter Wink for further resources in pursuit of a critique of violence that can live up to the standards of both theoretical precision and concrete praxis. In his pamphlet, Time for Outrage, Stéphane Hessel posits that “the future belongs to nonviolence and the reconciliation of clashing cultures,” arguing that “nonviolence is a more reliable method to end violence.”^{Footnote 50} Although Hessel’s assertion is a suggestive comment in a pamphlet meant to inspire a popular audience, the wager of the present text is that his inclination is correct: violence cannot be undone by means of further violence. Many have arrived at this conclusion without religious or Christian commitments, but those who have do so in such a way that challenges the caricature of Christianity as a violent religion.

Girard’s work provides a diagnosis of the problem of violence through analyses of mimetic desire and the phenomenon of scapegoating.^{Footnote 51} Understanding human desire to be fundamentally mimetic, Girard sets forth a theory of the transcultural mechanisms behind violence. Beginning with the idea that our desires are imitative, therefore originating from social sources outside of the self, Girard suggests that mimetic desire produces social violence, most often the violences of vengeance, scapegoating, and sacrifice. The imitation of others leads to the substitution of the desire of the other for the desired thing, and the resentment of the crowd becomes focused on an individual onto whom is heaped the entirety of the rivalry between persons (a rivalry that itself has its source in the mimetic nature of desire). For Girard, the scandal in which the contradictions of desire are manifest cannot be sustained forever, and eventually reaches a breaking point with the outbreak of violence. Through the confusion of the desired object with the desire of the other, and through competitive and antagonistic social relations, the scapegoating mechanism unites those who were previously divided by the rivalry of mimetic desire.^{Footnote 52} Girard argues that “human culture is predisposed to the permanent concealment of its origins in collective violence.”^{Footnote 53} In short, for Girard, the history of mob persecution hides a history of scapegoating and mimetic violence in both mythology and religion, manifest in the death of Socrates, the death of Christ, and in great works of literature.

Like Girard, the Christian theologian Walter Wink describes a similar genealogy of violence at the core of which is not the mimetic cycle, but what he calls “the myth of redemptive violence.”^{Footnote 54} The myth of redemptive violence, mentioned at the beginning of this essay and challenged by Hessel and Girard, is the thought that violence, suffering, and evil can be eliminated or reduced by way of further violence—a violence that is often thought to be restrained, state-sanctioned, and reasonable, but is too often just as horrific as the violence that it attempts to eliminate. Wink asks: “How can we oppose evil without creating new evils and being made evil ourselves?”^{Footnote 55} Constructing a Christian social ethic that opposes the spiritual-social evils of earthly “powers and principalities,” Wink identifies violence as “the ethos of our times” with deep roots in ancient myth and religion.^{Footnote 56} He attributes the success of the myth of redemptive violence to its seemingly natural status. Much like the critique of the secular outlined above, for Wink, violence naturalizes itself and masquerades as the normal state of the world, and furthermore the act of meeting violence with violence is understood to be unavoidable. Drawing upon the Babylonian creation myth described in the Enuma Elish, Wink observes violence at the beginning of human culture, and suggests that a way beyond it can be found in the renunciation of the myth of redemptive violence. Identifying the myth of redemptive violence not just in the ancient world, but also in contemporary popular culture and American militarism, Wink provides a critique of violence that acknowledges the reality of violence, while challenging the supposed ‘realism’ that restricts movement beyond or away from violence.^{Footnote 57}

Against the naturalization of the “domination system,” Wink suggests that a third way beyond passivity and redemptive violence can be found in “nonviolent direct action,” which is exemplified by the life of Jesus Christ.^{Footnote 58} Through an analysis of Christ’s command to turn the other cheek to one’s aggressor, Wink exposes the subversive potential of such an act by appealing to the cultural context in which such a striking act would occur. Suggesting that turning the other check forces the aggressor to strike the individual with the back of the hand, and therefore as an equal, rather than just the open hand (as an oppressor), Wink shows how turning the other cheek is but one non-cooperative act that undercuts the dominance of the aggressor, and therefore resists the naturalizing logic of the myth of redemptive violence.^{Footnote 59}

The Critique of Metaphysical Violence

The critique of metaphysical violence disrupts the naturalization of violence that occurs in the movement from the descriptive fact that we live in a violent world toward the prescription that violence must be part of the solution to the problem of violence. If we take the argument of the myth of redemptive violence seriously, whether from a secular or Christian standpoint (or neither), then we must consider the possibility that not only does it apply to material violences like murder or war but also to any metaphysics that is propped up by a dominating, controlling, reductive, or essentialist epistemology. The critique of metaphysical violence also involves the acknowledgment that violence can be done in the very establishment and identification of violence. Decisions about what constitute the boundaries that are violated and the occasions of their violation are always both metaphysical and political. It is too simple to divide epistemology (a category concerned with our habits of thinking, knowing, and conducting ourselves in discourse) from ontology (a category concerned with the structure of the relationship between thought and being) with the expectation that the latter can be insulated from all prescription. The slippage of prescription and description runs through the aforementioned distinction, meaning that both epistemologies and ontologies contain within them explicit descriptions and implicit prescriptions. An is is rarely found without a presumed ought and an ought usually bears within itself certain assumptions about what is. Amidst the ambiguous (but not unknowable) relationship between description and prescription, the problem of violence endures in visible ways as material phenomena, but also conceals itself in ideology.

In light of this concern for metaphysics and violence in the postsecular context, below I survey the works of Grace Jantzen, Miranda Fricker and Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, and John Milbank, precisely because each of these thinkers in some way walks the line between religion and secularity and inhabits an in-between space that takes seriously the critiques of both secular reason and violence outlined above.

Grace Jantzen

One underappreciated thinker who investigates violence in an epistemological context is Grace Jantzen, whose unfinished multi-volume work Death and the Displacement of Beauty opposes the desire for death and the emphasis on mortality with a life-affirming philosophy of beauty and natality. In the first volume of this project, called Foundations of Violence, Jantzen writes of the “dissonance between beauty and violence” and the love of death in the cultural habitus of the West, while searching for the “potential for a new beginning” that could critique this necrophilia on both material and discursive fronts.^{Footnote 60} Much of Foundations of Violence examines the roots of violence in ancient cultures, but given that our concern is contemporary I will focus on the framing questions and conclusions that Jantzen derives from her deep textual investigation of Platonic and Homeric writings. Against the violent “thought patterns” of modernity, particularly the preoccupation with death, Jantzen critiques our social and cultural habitus (Pierre Bourdieu) by opposing the violence present when those in power dominate others through both physical means (e.g., war, force) and symbolic means (e.g., anxiety, desire for control).^{Footnote 61} Proceeding from a critique of the fear of death and the love of conflict, Jantzen identifies a discursive kind of violence in the language that governs much of our contemporary conversations and exchanges. Targeting discursive habits of the Anglo-American analytic philosophical tradition, Jantzen writes: “Metaphors of violence abound. Positions are advanced, attacked, defended, embattled, or shot down in flames, as though philosophy consisted of intellectual warfare.”^{Footnote 62} Rather than suggesting that these hostile and aggressive ways of speaking simply cause social violences, Jantzen suggests that the reverse is also true, namely that “the language of violence whether at academic or popular levels, is indicative of structures of a symbolic within which violence and death are unthinkingly chosen as apt metaphors for a vast range of causes and activities.”^{Footnote 63} The mutually reinforcing relationship between violent epistemologies and the material violences of the world is further complicated by Jantzen’s foundational feminist argument that “it was predominantly men who structured the symbolic” and its concern for death, and men who have wielded violence and used it to subjugate women in both corporeal and symbolic ways from Ancient Rome, through Christendom, to the present day.^{Footnote 64}

This means for the present inquiry, that any discussion of violence undertaken in these pages must be conditioned by feminist critique if it is to have any integrity as a critique of the real social violence that women and others who find themselves in positions of oppression suffer. Following Jantzen (and Wink), I suggest that rather than allowing the assumption that violence is ‘natural’ to naturalize our violence,^{Footnote 65} any critique of violence must call into question the very basic structures of human experience that permit or encourage the system of power that maintains the violent relationship between privilege and oppression.^{Footnote 66}

Miranda Fricker and Judith Butler

In her book, Epistemic Injustice, feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker develops the notion of epistemic injustice, defined as “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”^{Footnote 67} She then divides epistemic injustice into cases of “testimonial injustice” and “hermeneutical injustice.”^{Footnote 68} On one hand, in cases of testimonial injustice, epistemic injustice is done when prejudices prevent a hearer from hearing the testimony of another as legitimate or credible. On the other hand, in cases of hermeneutical injustice, epistemic injustice is done when the lack of critical concepts disadvantages individuals by preventing them from naming and understanding their social circumstances and experiences. Resisting what she identifies as the reductive tendency of postmodernism, Fricker proceeds with an analytical precision that risks the kind of epistemic violence that Jantzen describes as characteristic of analytic philosophy, but does so with the express purpose of critiquing the abuse of epistemic power. Understanding testimonial injustice to proceed (partially) from a kind of “identity prejudice,” Fricker argues that “any epistemic injustice wrongs someone in their capacity as a subject of knowledge, and thus in a capacity essential to human value.”^{Footnote 69} In a certain way, Fricker’s investigation concerns itself with the dignity of human identity, considering epistemic injustice to be that which stands in the way of people being who they are and becoming who they will be. In the later chapters of Epistemic Injustice in particular, Fricker examines feminist arguments against objectification and develops the concept of hermeneutical injustice, using the example of women who suffered from sexual harassment before the concept of sexual harassment was available.^{Footnote 70}

The concept of epistemic injustice, or epistemological violence, is developed by other feminist philosophers, sometimes with concerns for methodology,^{Footnote 71} and sometimes in ways that examine the continuities and discontinuities between theory and practice. In her book, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler asks fundamental questions about the nature of violence and calls for a leftist resistance to both military violence and the underlying social violences of racism, sexism, and classism. Developing a concept of precarity to which Lorey is indebted, and connecting precarity with violence, Butler writes that “the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge or, indeed, to guard against injury and violence.”^{Footnote 72} Critiquing the violent framing of war and the problems of secular sensibilities, Butler argues that we must avoid distraction from the critique of violence and attend to the ways in which both secular and religious perspectives offer critiques of state violence.^{Footnote 73} In the final chapter of Frames of War, “The Claim of Non-Violence,” Butler critiques the principle of nonviolence, noting that nonviolence is always an “address” and an “appeal” that cannot be policed or enforced as law, but serves instead as a reminder that violence is within us, and so often used to frame our experiences in an epistemologically significant way.^{Footnote 74} Unlike Wink and others who reject counter-violence, Butler defends the possibility of redemptive violence.^{Footnote 75} Being open to the necessity of counter-violence in the reversal of patriarchal power rather than the levelling of power relations, Butler speaks of counter-violence as a possibility (even a necessity) for democratic politics.^{Footnote 76}

Returning to Fricker, we can ask similar questions about the concept of epistemic injustice: is the use of epistemic power and coercive rhetorical force sometimes ethically defensible in the name of democracy or free speech, or is it a capitulation to the myth of redemptive violence? The connection between power and knowledge means that we find ourselves in epistemic environments in which truths are legitimated and delegitimated by means of persuasion and varieties of reason that are so often male. In her essay, “Violence Against Violence Against Women,” Dianne Chisholm suggests that it is symbolic counter-violence that must be waged by feminists against the established power of male violence.^{Footnote 77} For Chisholm, (drawing on Bourdieu, like Jantzen) the establishment of symbolic violence by the legitimating and delegitimating forces of taste and judgement result in a habitus in which unspoken male rules govern women through shame, silence, and judgement. The sexual oppression that legitimates male power in the eyes of women constitutes a symbolic violence that is very similar to Fricker’s epistemic injustice. For Chisholm, the continuity between epistemic violence and violence against women is clear: “Symbolic violence produces and sanctions actual, sexual violence …,”^{Footnote 78} which is to say that the stakes could not be higher, for if the epistemological violence that permits social violence goes unchallenged, then it will endure.

Michel Foucault

Fricker, Butler, and Chisholm are each indebted to Foucault in their analysis of power (with Fricker critiquing his statement that “power exists only when it is put into action” and Chisholm employing his critique of the humanist subject^{Footnote 79}), and each work with his idea that women and other groups subject to oppression are playing a game in which the rules keep changing at the hands of those with power. In an interview titled “Truth and Power” Foucault speaks to these “interweaving of effects of power and knowledge” in the context of the social regulation within discursive regimes.^{Footnote 80} For Foucault, it is “a question of what governs statements, and the way in which they govern each other so as to constitute a set of propositions which are scientifically acceptable.”^{Footnote 81} Where in this passage Foucault is concerned with the history of knowledge, the same concept of epistemological power and its governance—one could even call it a kind of ‘religio’—occurs later in the same interview when Foucault speaks of war. Moving beyond an understanding of power as mere repression, Foucault examines the “productive aspect of power” that is not just the repressive no-saying of the prohibiting law, but is found in the insidious ways in which power “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse … [as] a productive network which runs through the whole social body …”^{Footnote 82} This economy of power is founded on sovereign law (Foucault notes that “political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign”^{Footnote 83}) which prompts his question: “isn’t power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldn’t one therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of war? Isn’t power a sort of generalized war which assumes at particular moments the forms of peace and the State? Peace would then be a form of war, and the State a means of waging it.”^{Footnote 84} In this way, Foucault shares in a certain critique of the state as saviour from violence, much like Cavanaugh. In Foucault’s words, the task of the intellectual is to search out “a new politics of truth” that works at “detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.”^{Footnote 85} This politics of truth links together power, knowledge, and law in a way that critiques the violent ways in which we are governed by epistemological powers of repression and discursive production. In this way, following Wink, Jantzen, and Fricker, we can see that, like violence, knowledge is a kind of power that perpetuates itself through habituated discursive norms masquerading as natural laws.

Walter Benjamin

In his essay, “Critique of Violence [Zur Kritik der Gewalt],” Walter Benjamin also understands violence in close relation to law. For Benjamin, any discussion of violence is a discussion of ethics and the relationship between means and ends. He writes that “violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not of ends.”^{Footnote 86} Distinguishing between the justification of potentially violent means by justified ends in natural law, and the justification of potentially violent ends by justified means in positive law, Benjamin identifies the blindness of positive law to “the absoluteness of ends” and the blindness of natural law to “the contingency of means.”^{Footnote 87} Benjamin notes that positive law rests on a “distinction between historically acknowledged, so-called sanctioned violence, and unsanctioned violence.”^{Footnote 88} This distinction then prompts his question: “what light is thrown on the nature of violence by the fact that such a criterion or distinction can be applied to it at all …?”^{Footnote 89} Benjamin’s insight, in part, is that violence requires a boundary-discourse, like law and its sanctioning effects, or education and its formative effects. Benjamin writes that “law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system,” meaning that in this legal context the limitation of violence advanced by the state is a means of preserving the law.^{Footnote 90} However, by contrast, the critique of violence coming from workers in the form of strike action (a kind of inaction) is an “escape from violence” imposed on the worker by the employer, and a kind of “withdrawal.”^{Footnote 91} But the right to strike is still granted by the state and still occurs under its conditions. The revolutionary general strike, on the other hand, is a “crisis” that “confronts” the “objective contradiction in the legal situation.”^{Footnote 92} Benjamin praises the general strike for its ability to confront the contradictions of both the state and labour by nonviolent means, and calls the violence of war “predatory.”^{Footnote 93} For Benjamin, military violence is “paradigmatic of all violence used for natural ends, there is inherent in all such violence a lawmaking character.”^{Footnote 94} The law-making and law-preserving characteristics of violence both result in Benjamin’s “critique of all legal violence” which asks “are [there] no other than violent means for regulating conflicting human interests?”^{Footnote 95} Where law and contract alike depend upon the real threat of violence should their lines be crossed, Benjamin suggests that there is hope for nonviolent action and conflict resolution, but they require “courtesy, sympathy, peaceableness, [and] trust.”^{Footnote 96} Benjamin’s critique of violence does not just point out the lack of these principles, however, but it is a critique of legal violence, and of the fact that the state does violence legally, whether in the name of social regulation and national security or internationally oriented imperialism and militarism. Similar to the thinkers outlined above, Benjamin sees the law-making and law-preserving functions of violence as the exertion of epistemological power by erecting laws and treaties with “lines that may not be crossed.”^{Footnote 97}

We can ask then, without law, what does violence violate? And here we should note that, in our postsecular context, any political or moral law that we encounter is inevitably a mix of religious and secular influences. There is no violence without a boundary to be violated, and those boundaries are set by the state in such a way that establishes one side of the line as sensible legal action, and the other side of the line as violent and barbaric activity. But Benjamin is not done, for he introduces two further kinds of violence: the law-making mythical violence, and the law-destroying divine violence: “if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood.”^{Footnote 98} Divine violence disrupts and destroys the structure of legal violence that is so concerned with means and ends, and instead asserts a different kind of sovereignty, and not one that decides on the state of exception (for that would be law-making and law-preserving) but one that constitutes a critique of violence and its establishment through powered knowledge.^{Footnote 99} The constitutive critique of legal violence established by divine violence is a critique because it destroys the categories that hold legal violence in place, revealing that violence is only as violence is identified within a structure of boundaries and lines that cannot be crossed without penalty.

Benjamin’s critique of violence reveals yet again that there is something epistemological about violence because we only know violence when some sacred boundary has been transgressed or some revered icon profaned. But this is not yet the question of violence in the epistemological register—a violence done simply by knowing or identifying—for it is still the epistemological critique of a kind of violence that is happening in a material situation like a strike or a war. To understand epistemological violence, we need to delve further into ontological violence, precisely because the boundaries that are violated when violence is done are ontological boundaries, insofar as our ontologies are tied together with our epistemologies in an eternal struggle between mind and world, thought and being, and the further struggle to move apart from these distinctions.

Theodor Adorno

In his Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno undertakes a different sort of critique of violence by rejecting the “identitarian” thinking that fixes upon identities too determinately and subjects the principle identity to a positive status that restricts its capacity to be otherwise.^{Footnote 100} Adorno seeks to free dialectics from its need to achieve something positive by way of something negative (citing both Plato’s dialectics and Hegel’s negation of negation), and by unbinding it from positivity Adorno hopes that the dialectic will paradoxically retain its determinacy.^{Footnote 101} Through a critique of Hegel’s dialectic and its “unsuccessful attempt to use philosophical concepts to cope with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts,” Adorno articulates his own negative dialectic that seeks to account for “the consistent sense of non-identity” present within identity itself.^{Footnote 102} Elsewhere, in his Dialectic of Enlightenment (written with Horkheimer), he also expresses this identity critique, stating that “language expresses the contradiction that something is itself and at one and at the same time something other than itself, identical and not identical.”^{Footnote 103} Both of these extracts from Adorno’s work illustrate his concern for metaphysical views of identity that attempt to erase exceptions and eliminate interior contradictions within identities, in the name of consistency and the popular logical principles of identity (A=A), non-contradiction (not both A and not-A), and excluded middle (either A or not-A).^{Footnote 104} These restrictive ways of understanding identity constitute a refusal of the contradictions that so plainly inhere in both things and our identification of things, as well as a refusal to admit to the ambiguities and limitations of language when applied to human experience. Adorno’s critique, then, suggests that these logical ways of understanding identity bring with them a kind of violence that violates the interior depth of identities. His critique suggests that “Identity and contradiction are welded together … [and] Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification.”^{Footnote 105} Against the aporetic and agonistic overdeterminations of dialectical thinking in Hegel, Adorno wants to do away with dialectics as a dogmatic principle, even understanding the contradictory nature of identity as something regrettable and certainly not utopian.^{Footnote 106} For Adorno, thinking itself is a kind of negation of the world that resists “that which is forced upon it” from the outside.^{Footnote 107} In this way, thinking goes beyond the given world, for even when it is “doing violence to the object of its synthesis, our thinking heeds a potential that waits in the object, and it unconsciously obeys the idea of making amends to the pieces for what it has done.”^{Footnote 108} The interplay of the desire for reconciliation and the irreconcilability of our thinking about identities with those identities themselves, is part of the violence that Adorno is addressing on the borderline between epistemology and ontology. Simply put, Adorno’s negative dialectics and critique of identitarian thinking are concerned with how we know identities (epistemology), but it is also about the nature of those identities in themselves (ontology), insofar as they can be known and named (and it is this extent that is in many ways at issue, despite how it reaffirms the problematic divide between thought and being, or subject and object). Conscious of the violence at the heart of identity and the dialectical process that purports to describe and prescribe it, Adorno’s critique serves as a further reminder that boundary-discourse holds identity in place as a singularity by means of a law-like policing of consistency.

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida also writes of the relationship between violence, epistemology, and ontology in his essay on Levinas called “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference. Moving through the question of philosophy, Derrida addresses the work of Levinas and argues that we must depart from the reception of the Greek logos in our present understanding of identity.^{Footnote 109} For Derrida, Levinas opposes a certain inheritance of Greek metaphysics by raising up another kind of metaphysics that “calls upon the ethical relationship—a nonviolent relationship to the infinite as infinitely other, to the Other—as the only one capable of opening the space of transcendence and of liberating metaphysics.”^{Footnote 110} This opening of metaphysics to the critique of its own violence runs throughout Derrida’s essay, culminating in his statement, “Predication is the first violence.”^{Footnote 111} I take this to mean that for Derrida the predication of one thing upon the other in the joining of subject and predicate is a violation of the identities involved, for they are irreducible to one another and possess a certain sanctity. To say one thing of another is to violate both things, and here the measure of violation is the boundary that sets one thing apart from another (and whether this boundary is inherent or imposed is yet another question). For Derrida, it seems that the imposition of predication is a kind of violent force, comparable in some ways to Foucault’s suggestion that all power is a kind of war.

Here Derrida is not interested in pure nonviolence because, like pure violence, pure nonviolence is a contradiction.^{Footnote 112} Rather than harbour the fantasy that violence can be removed from the world, Derrida’s critique contains a certain kind of realism, given that it does not deny the fact that violence endures. The violence that Derrida identifies through Levinas is ontological because it concerns being and the copula. He writes that “according to Levinas, nonviolent language would be a language which would do without the verb to be, that is, without predication.”^{Footnote 113} Although Derrida’s essay, like his other work, is wide ranging and rich in reference, I draw this point out to show a further approach to the question of ontological violence. For Derrida, violence is at the heart of things, both ontologically and epistemologically, and evident in disjunctive ways of thinking and the force of law.^{Footnote 114} However, other thinkers take issue with Derrida’s suggestion that violence is originary and primordial. One such thinker is the Christian theologian John Milbank, the main proponent of Radical Orthodoxy, a theological perspective that rejects the burden of answering the charges of secular liberalism and asserts the truth of Christianity against the postmodern genealogy of nihilism.

John Milbank

In his book, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason, and in another work called Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon, Milbank critiques the certainties of the secular project in a way that is broadly similar to Asad’s critique outlined above. Both thinkers argue that the secular is not the bedrock underneath the illusory accretion of religion, and both suggest that the secular struggles with a legacy of disenchantment and unsupportable claims to neutrality, neither of which it can avoid. However, Milbank’s project takes a step beyond critiquing the secular, for it follows its critical work (to which the present text is indebted) with the problematic assertion of Christian truth that seeks to compete and win against the secular on the new terms of the postsecular debate. In terms of the present concern for violence and metaphysics, a part of Milbank’s project involves an ontology of peace that is directly opposed to Derrida’s ontology of violence.

Challenging the neoliberal order with the claims of a particular kind of Christian theology, Milbank critiques the genealogy of nihilism of both the May 1968 thinkers and their roots in Nietzsche and Heidegger. Against the postmodern, in both its historicist genealogy and its ontological difference, Milbank opposes nihilism on the grounds that it “requires an ontology of violence.”^{Footnote 115} Drawing a line from the postmodern, through the privileging of history and difference, to nihilism, Milbank’s reading of the thinkers of this tradition is suspect from the start because it gathers the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida under one banner, self-avowedly effacing the differences between them in order to see them as “elaborations of a single nihilistic philosophy.”^{Footnote 116} Setting this criticism aside (for it may be concerned with difference in exactly the way that Milbank rejects), we can observe that Milbank’s critique of nihilism does not proceed from ‘secular’ sensibilities. In this way his critique is refreshing and illuminating, for it does not answer contemporary questions, but holds itself to truth-conditions outside of the secular and liberal epistemological spheres. However controversial this may be, it remains up to Milbank’s readers and critics to then sort out what of secular reason deserves this kind of radical critique and what of secular reason should be valued. Although he considers his work to be the opening of “the most radical imaginable modern pluralism,” he nonetheless positions his vision of plurality in relation with the Christian vision of the Good and the True in such a way that refuses the very real differences between Christian ways of knowing and understanding and those of ‘other’ religious traditions.^{Footnote 117} Although he refreshingly moves beyond the “mere liberal agreement to disagree” he does so while “regarding Catholic Christianity as fulfilling the best pagan impulses.”^{Footnote 118} While his critique of liberal agree-to-disagree ‘pluralism’ is helpful, it permits Milbank to repeat the same sort of problematic positioning of Christianity as the fulfilment of all other (‘pagan’) perspectives that permits colonial and imperialistic violence against those who do not share a Christian conception of the Good and the True. Milbank’s critique is refreshing and helpful in some ways, but cannot appear as anything but supremacist and violent if we accept the idea that positioning one’s own discourse as the fulfilment of all others is a bad thing to do. Milbank justifies this positioning on theological terms in part by appealing to the persuasiveness of the “Christian logos itself, not the apologetic mediation of a supposedly neutral human reason.”^{Footnote 119} But are these the only two options—the persuasive assertion of Christianity as the fulfilment of all other perspectives or the apologetic mediations of liberal discourse—or is there room for a perspective that does not capitulate to the discontents of either? The stakes are high for Milbank, given that he understands Christian truth to be radically compromised when it “surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse” and exhibits a “false humility.”^{Footnote 120}

However, we must consider the possibility that Christianity that might refuse to position itself as a metadiscourse on the grounds that this positioning is a kind of violence radically contrary to Christ’s critique of violence (as suggested by Wink and others). Milbank writes that “only Christian theology now offers a discourse able to position and overcome nihilism itself. This is why it is so important to reassert theology as a master discourse; theology, alone, remains the discourse of non-mastery.”^{Footnote 121} But this assertion is problematic, for nihilism cannot be overcome by the force of assertion (meaninglessness remains, regardless), and we know that theology is never alone, for it always has others, and these others (the friend, the enemy, the neighbour, and the stranger) never make demands of theology on its own terms, but do so on their terms. Are we to believe that the other must come to Christianity or be abandoned to the jaws of nihilism? Is Milbank really suggesting that his formulation of Christianity is not a discourse of mastery, when the surrounding sentences suggest that Christianity betrays itself if it does not assert mastery?

In order to understand the problems and prospects of Milbank’s theology more deeply, I now turn to his work on violence and ontological peace. When Milbank writes of the “tragic dimension” of Christianity, he critiques a certain kind of violence, but later he permits another kind of coercive and regulatory violence.^{Footnote 122} Sorting out what Milbank means by ‘violence’ is an easier task when reading Being Reconciled, a text in which he explicitly addresses the problems of evil, violence, and theodicy. Proceeding from the ‘gift’ as a central figure for Christian theology, Milbank sees the gift in creation, grace, and the Incarnation of Christ, while also suggesting that “evil and violence are the refusal of gift” while “atonement is the renewed and hyperbolic gift that is for-giveness.”^{Footnote 123} Aligning with his critique of secular reason, Milbank understands the gift to be at the ground of things, stating that “for theology there are no ‘givens’ only ‘gifts,’” meaning that, while the secular position may see the things of the world to be assumed givens, Christianity insists that all things are gifts from God the giver.^{Footnote 124}

For Milbank, the contradiction between the givenness of things and the presence of evil and violence in the world is reconciled in his rehabilitation of the ‘privation theory’ of evil. Milbank opposes the ‘radical evil’ school and its giving or acknowledgment of ontological positivity to evil.^{Footnote 125} Opposing the idea that the privation theory permits or even encourages radical evil, Milbank argues that “the modern, positive theory of evil is in a measure responsible for the modern actuality of evil.”^{Footnote 126} As a part of this larger argument, Milbank addresses the relationship between ontology and violence in a way that speaks to the critique of metaphysical violence. Concerned that “the theory of radical evil focuses too much upon violence” and does not adequately “discriminate amongst invasions” that are ubiquitous.^{Footnote 127} Here Milbank defines violence by stating that “violence is only violence when it ruins an essence (how something should be) or diverts from a goal (how something should develop).”^{Footnote 128} In this way, violence is evil, for ‘evil’ is only named as such when the positivity of the Good is ruined or diverted. In Milbank’s privation theory, evil is deficiency in both will and act, whereas for the radical evil school the act is violent but the will is not.^{Footnote 129} On this view, “evil and violence are convertible but not identical” and part of this distinction results from the fact that “violence is never simply evident, because we have to judge whether a substantive good has been impaired.”^{Footnote 130}

Here we can see how Milbank sits in relation to the critiques of violence offered by the voices surveyed above. For Milbank, violence is often concealed and requires certain structures in order to be identified. In this way, he also understands violence to require a boundary-discourse that requires a measure or method of adjudicating between what is and is not violent. For Milbank, violence is violence because it violates the essence of things and the purpose of things, effacing or misdirecting things on the level of their esse and telos. In this way, violence is ontological, and not just a material phenomenon. However, the standards that Milbank uses to judge whether something is violent come from the tradition of Christian theology. Milbank is confident that Christianity is the best way of discerning what is violent and what is not, and he believes that the violence of nihilism must be critiqued and replaced with an ontology of peace. But Derrida’s rejoinder would doubtless be that the very mode of adjudication and the Christian confidence in predication that Milbank exhibits are a deeper violence, for they assume final and certain knowledge of the esse and telos of all things.